The Fulbright U.S. Student Program and other national and international organizations have awarded postgraduate scholarships and fellowships to 14 members of the University of Notre Dame’s Class of 2014, including 11 who majored in the College of Arts and Letters. In addition, three Arts and Letters graduates from earlier classes received prestigious awards this year, including a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and a George Mitchell Scholarship.

“This internship has given me the opportunity to learn a lot of skills that are really valuable,” said Ashley Lawrence ‘14, a psychology major in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters. During the summer of 2013, Lawrence interned in Baltimore at the Laboratory for Behavioral Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

One hundred fifty-two University of Notre Dame graduating seniors—many of them from the College of Arts and Letters—are embarking on a year or more of service in locations around the globe. They were honored during the University’s annual Service Send-Off ceremony on Saturday, May 17 in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Leighton Concert Hall.

The University of Notre Dame’s Graduate School recognized 344 master’s and 204 doctoral degree recipients and presented several awards during Commencement ceremonies on Saturday, May 17 in the Compton Family Ice Arena. Alumna Kerry Ann Rockquemore, president and CEO of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, delivered the Commencement Address. The top graduating doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences, science, and engineering were honored with the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate School Awards.

Congratulations to the Class of 2014! This video, screened at the Arts and Letters Diploma Ceremony, features several of our seniors reflecting on their time at Notre Dame and in the College of Arts and Letters.

When USAID announced winners of a new, nationwide competition for innovative projects in the field of democracy, human rights, and governance last week, scholars from the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science and Kellogg Institute for International Studies had won two of the nine awards.

With the support of two major awards, Jaimie Bleck, Ford Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame, will intensify her research on the political turbulence and democratic recovery in Mali.

Notre Dame Associate Professor Abigail Wozniak has been appointed to a one-year term as a senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the board that advises President Barack Obama and his staff on domestic and international economic policy.

“There’s so much that goes into preparing a show that you never see,” said senior Blake Avery, a gender studies and film, television, and theatre major. During the summer of 2013, Avery worked as a development intern at 44 Blue Productions, a documentary television production company in Los Angeles.

“I feel like I’ve been learning so much all the time, especially what it takes to be in the publishing industry,” says senior English and design major Katie Heit. Thanks to the Arts and Letters Summer Internship Program, Heit spent last summer working as an editorial and design intern with Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in New York.

Junior Vienna Wagner, an English major in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, has won a 2014 Beinecke Scholarship. Awarded to students who show “exceptional promise” to become leading scholars, the scholarship supports graduate study in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, who received her doctorate in sociology from the University of Notre Dame in 1999, will deliver the address at the University’s Graduate School Commencement Ceremony at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 17, in the Compton Family Ice Arena. Rockquemore will receive the Distinguished Alumna Award at the Graduate School Awards Dinner on May 16. Her address will be the centerpiece of the Graduate School Commencement ceremony the next day, when the University will honor its master’s and doctoral degree recipients.

After marrying her college sweetheart when she graduated from Notre Dame in 1993, Amy Novak and her husband moved nine times, landing everywhere from Dayton, Ohio to Ottawa, Canada. No matter what city they called home, Novak was able to find challenging and fulfilling work to support her growing family. Novak majored in history in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, and she knew how to convey to employers what skills she gained as a liberal arts graduate and how she could use those skills to enhance an organization—whether it was in higher education or the technology industry. In June 2013 she became the first female president of Dakota Wesleyan University.

Twenty-one University of Notre Dame faculty members have received Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and three faculty and staff have been honored with Dockweiler Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising.

A recent spate of vandalism on church buildings in Jerusalem should “challenge the simplistic ideas of certain Christian supporters of Israel who imagine that Christians and Jews are natural allies against a dangerous Arab enemy,” according to Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic studies and theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Two University of Notre Dame professors—Scott Monroe, an expert in depressive disorders, and Donald Crafton, who holds Notre Dame’s first endowed chair for film studies—have been awarded 2014 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Faculty members in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have won 15 Guggenheim fellowships in the past 14 years.

Joan of Arc, leader of armies, adviser to King Charles VII, and patron saint of France, has been a role model to those who suffer for their convictions for more than 600 years. In the first of a series of sacred music dramas produced at the University of Notre Dame, Joan of Arc also served as inspiration for an interdisciplinary project featuring elements of film, music, and a multi-media art installation, said Sacred Music at Notre Dame Professor Carmen-Helena Téllez.